...the Office of Special Counsel is preparing to jump into one of the most sensitive and potentially explosive issues in Washington, launching a broad investigation into key elements of the White House political operations that for more than six years have been headed by chief strategist Karl Rove.
...
"We will take the evidence where it leads us," Scott J. Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel and a presidential appointee, said in an interview Monday. "We will not leave any stone unturned."

What is happening to the bees?

More than a quarter of the country's 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost -- tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives.

As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. Or was it a secret plot by Russia or Osama bin Laden to bring down American agriculture? Or, as some blogs have asserted, the rapture of the bees, in which God recalled them to heaven? Researchers have heard it all.

...
A recent survey of 13 states by the Apiary Inspectors of America showed that 26 percent of beekeepers had lost half of their bee colonies between September and March.

Honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain. They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts. The number of bee colonies has been declining since the 1940s, even as the crops that rely on them, such as California almonds, have grown. In October, at about the time that beekeepers were experiencing huge bee losses, a study by the National Academy of Sciences questioned whether American agriculture was relying too heavily on one type of pollinator, the honeybee.

Of course, (a) I got 20 years of loyal hot-water-providing service out of it, so who's complaining.  And, it's not like it's the middle of winter, when a hot shower is the ticket to be warm.  Moreover, (b) all the water on the basement floor couldn't have come at a more propitious time.  This is true because the (2 feet of) basement flood from the last big storm had left a lot of "grit" - fine dirt and mud - all over the concrete and (having pumped out the basement last week) the basement was (courtesy of fans) just getting dry enough that all that crud was going to go airborne soon.  The clean water from the heater and a new push-broom made for lots of goood clean-up and a shiny concrete floor (at least where the water got).  Plus, the trusty half-horse submersible pump was looking lonely and this gave it another opportunity to shine.

And, finally, ain't (what a Rethug would call) socialism grand?  The power company has an energy-conservation deal going (I think there's some gov't money, regulation or both making it happen) where you can get energy efficient appliances (like, uh, water heaters) from them, installed by contractors (on whom they have a leash called "regular business") for competitive, if not subsidized, prices.  The free market gave me one guy who wanted all sorts of information (he hadn't gotten to my social, but he was going there) before he'd even talk about a quote, a couple guys who sounded like characters from the Sopranos, and one guy who's number's been disconnected.  The Rethug-calls-it-socialism program gets me hot water tomorrow morning.  For under a thou.  

A central tenet of US domestic policy - which came to the fore in the Depression/New Deal and  has survived the rise of the Rethugs pretty much unchallenged - has been ensuring there's more than enough food, at prices cheap enough that the diseases of obesity (or at least being well-fed) (e.g. diabetes, high blood pressure, morbid obesity) are common among even the poorest of Americans.  The same goes for hot water and enclosed shelter though to a lesser degree

And that surely irks the heck out of Rethugs _ the idea that average people can avoid getting screwed (pricewise and availabilitywise) on the essentials of life>

Pat Tillman's brother, along with the soldier who was with Tillman when he was killed and a naval officer who eulogized the former NFL star, told Congress today that the military betrayed Tillman's family and misled the nation with false stories of how Tillman died.
[...]
Army Ranger Bryan O'Neal, just yards from Tillman when he was killed, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that an officer ordered him not to tell Kevin how Tillman was killed.
[...]
Evidence was also presented suggesting there was high interest by the White House in Tillman in the days after his death.
One day after a White House speech writer inquired in an e-mail about Tillman's death for a speech President Bush would be giving, an Army general warned that "the country's leaders" should be warned to be vague about Tillman's death since there was a high likelihood it was friendly fire.
In Bush's speech that weekend, he mentioned only Tillman's "courage" and wasn't specific about the circumstances of his death.